Forum Upgrade May 29-30

This weekend is the scheduled upgrade for our forum software. During this transition we will implement the first of the forum upgrades we announced two months ago on March 2. The forum will be down for several hours beginning Sunday afternoon and will be upgraded and back on-line as soon as possible. After the upgrade, you’ll see many updates and many requested features. These will be the biggest updates we've made to the forum in many years. More new features will be implemented later this summer.

Please follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts if you want to stay up-to-date with the upgrade process as it happens. We'll announce on Facebook and Twitter immediately when the new forum is back on-line.

Thanks in advance for your understanding. If you have any questions about this transition, please post here in our "Feedback" section.

As many of you know we've been using vBulletin since April 2002. While vBulletin has had its glory days as arguably one of the best forum solutions available, vBulletin has slowly encountered many changes since they were bought by Internet Brands in 2007.

We are currently using vBulletin 3 and the vBulletin 3 product line will not be receiving any further updates. Soon security patches will cease as well. So staying at vBulletin 3 isn't a good option since the product is based on old standards and is no longer in development. While we hoped the latest vBulletin 4 product would improve to a level where we felt comfortable using it, after a long evaluation we've decided to move the Muppet Central Forum to a new platform. During the past 18 months, the latest releases of vBulletin have had many bugs and maintenance issues. The company is also going in a different direction than the original vBulletin team.

Rest-assured that all of our posts, threads and member accounts will be migrated to our new forum. Your usernames, passwords, avatars will all remain the same and will automatically be transferred. Many of you will find the new forum innovative, edgy and cutting-edge while being very stable. The new software will allow us to do a lot of things long-term that weren't possible with vBulletin 3. We've tested the import process from vBulletin and everything went smoothly.

As a side note, this upgrade isn't just about the forum. In the future, we'll be making it much easier for everyone to contribute to not only the forum but the entire site as well. The forum upgrade needs to happen first though.

It should be a fun weekend and an exciting time for everyone. Thanks for your understanding during the scheduled downtime as we make this transition.

We're taking care of a few remaining maintenance issues. The forum will then be going off-line for the upgrade. It will take several hours in order to import our 800,000 posts and member accounts to the new forum.

Please follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts if you want to stay up-to-date with the upgrade process as it happens. We'll announce on Facebook and Twitter immediately when the new forum is back on-line.

The preparations for the forum migration took a little longer than planned today, but we wanted to ensure that everything is handled properly during the transition. So the Muppet Central Forum will now be going off-line Monday morning for several hours while our vBulletin database is imported into our new forum.

Please follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts if you want to stay up-to-date with the upgrade process as it happens. We'll announce on Facebook and Twitter immediately when the new forum is back on-line.

This should be a intersting thing to see go through. What all has to take place for somthing of this size to happen?

Click to expand...

Well, there are a few things involved obviously...

- Configuring and testing the new forum with our server
- Customizing the new forum to work within our framework
- Test importing our vBulletin forum into the new forum
- Making any needed changes to our vBulletin database before import
- Closing our vBulletin forum, backing up the database
- Importing the vBulletin database into the new forum
- Checking the new forum to be sure everything imported correctly
- Setting up redirects so that our vBulletin thread links automatically forward to our new forum threads
- Opening the new forum for members
- Continuing to tweak and make needed changes based on feedback